About Me

Blog Archive

Search This Blog

Friday, January 09, 2015

`Loss Is What We Hear'

Incipient
deafness has its consolations. It’s easier to ignore witless chatter, the
obligatory noise-making of those unhappy with dignified silence. And there is
what Les Murray in “Hearing Impairment” (The
Daylight Moon, 1987) calls, in shouted caps, “THE SAD SURREALISM OF THE
DEAF”:

“Hearing
loss? Yes, loss is what we hear

who
are starting to go deaf. Loss

trails
a lot of weird puns in its wake…”

One
tries to compensate with “active listening,” as opposed to passive hearing, but
learns to enjoy the garble, the mind’s futile efforts to make sense of the
inadequately perceived, to fill in the blanks. This morning, an
otolaryngologist will rebuild my left eardrum – the procedure is called tympanoplasty
– and implant a prosthetic bone of titanium. I don’t expect full stereo, just no
more mono. In “In the Park” (Not Waving but
Drowning, 1957), Stevie Smith overhears “two silvered gentlemen” talking.
One says: “Pray for the Mute.” His hard-of-hearing friend, after rhapsodizing
the amphibian, says, “`Pray for the Mute?’ / I thought you said the newt.” When
Muriel Spark reviewed Smith’s book in 1957 she observed: “The main theme of
this collection is that life is fairly deplorable and yet must be praised.”